in orbit

I Made A Meat Boy Thing

by Mike (2:17am EST) | Tags: Gaming Stuff, Creative, Fun Stuff - 0 Comments

Super Meat Boy is a game that appealed to me on a pretty fundamental level. It's a platformer focused on speed and crazy, well-timed jumps and has relatively little penalty for mistakes (you restart what is generally a pretty short level). It's basically the platform game I've always wanted. I was almost compelled to play it, even though at times it evoked high levels of frustration. The main thing about that, however, was even though I would mash my fleshy body into a saw blade (the same saw blade) dozens upon dozens of times I always knew why I had screwed up and I never blamed the game for being unfair. Not even once.

So with the release of the level editor I decided to see what I could come up with and I put together a five-level chapter called "Brownie Goes To Hell" which I'm fairly pleased with. It's not perfect but if you have the PC version of Super Meat Boy you should load up Super Meat World (which requires twenty bandages to unlock) and search for it in the chapters section, if you're so inclined. I hope you enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Gawking

by Mike (1:49am EST) | Tags: Creative, Serious Business, Internet! - 0 Comments

While the Gawker Media collection of sites have never really been my cup of tea for any number of reasons (which I won't get into) you really can't deny the popularity of their network in their respective industries. If you want some video game news out there you need to get it up on Kotaku. If you want the world to know about your new unreleased iPhone, leave it in a bar so Gizmodo can buy it off some guy. If you're a celebrity and want your inner-most secrets leaked to the public then a good bet is to contact someone at Gawker. I'm starting to get catty so I'll just move on, but you get the idea.

For once the news of the day for was not the content of one of these sites but rather how it is presented. Let me get this out of the way first: the new design, aesthetically, is a huge improvement over the old design. The old design was fairly hideous and wasted a lot of space. About the only things it did well were present a ton of the site's most recent content and keep some big-ticket articles of note up at the top. But now, out with the old, in with the new. The new Gawker sites look like a professionally designed iPad app. In fact that's the thing that most people seem to think of first when they see it, which was obviously the intended reaction.

That itself isn't bad, but sadly the site not only looks like an iPad app but seems to function as if it was intended to be one. This fact is made highly unfortunate due to the site being broken in mobile Safari. I don't have an iPad to test it in myself but it's more or less unusable on my iPhone, and I haven't heard much better from iPad owners.

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The Latest and Greatest

by Mike (8:03pm EST) | Tags: Geek Stuff, Creative, Internet! - 0 Comments

After a roughly two day hiatus this blog is back and (possibly) better than ever. That's actually partially a lie since for it to be better than ever I would have to get rid of this CMS (written in my foolish youth) but that's a project for another time.

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